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This article explores how perceived inefficiencies and inadequacies in the militia were reflected in contemporary works of fiction and satire. The militia's public image was consistently poor: half-trained battalions, staffed by inefficient senior officers, chronically short of subalterns and recruiting from the very worst elements of the working class. It suffered from the combined flaws of both regulars and volunteers, but was unable to benefit from either the Christian ‘civilizing mission’ of the former or the earnest patriotic enthusiasm of the latter. This negative image contributed to the ease with which the force was abolished after the Boer War.

In 1806 Louisa Calderon, a free woman of colour from Trinidad, became a cause celebre in Britain as the tragic and suffering victim of picqueting, a form of torture which involved her being suspended by her hand with one foot resting on a sharp point whilst undergoing interrogation. The order for Calderon's picqueting had come from the British military and civil governor of Trinidad, Sir Thomas Picton. This was not the only offence for which Picton stood accused, neither was it the most brutal. Yet it was Calderon's torture that captured the imagination of the press, bringing home the anxieties of Empire. In this widely and meticulously researched book, James Epstein examines the story behind the scandal of Picton's rule and Calderon's torture in order to bring to light the deeper structures of colonial violence revealed by such scandals. Epstein's Scandal of Colonial Rule opens with an account of the fleeting disruption that the Picton scandal caused to metropolitan ideas of imperial Britishness. With the revelations of Picton's violent and arbitrary rule, the comfortable conceit of the imperial civilizing mission was momentarily disturbed. Scandal of Colonial Rule unravels the myth of a benevolent British Empire shocked and appalled by its own lapses, and explores the complicity of networks of white colonists, both 'at home' and on the peripheries of empire, in the enacting and silencing of colonial violence. Through his micro-history of Picton's rule in Trinidad and the unfolding of the scandal, Epstein argues that violence in its many different, and subtle, forms was inherent in the configuration of British imperial identity and rule. Epstein begins his narrative in London, with the media excitement and court-room drama that Calderon's testament and Picton's defence provided for the metropole's political gossip networks. Defined as a

Derided by British intellectuals as ‘propaganda of inanity unparalleled in the world’s history’ and as an ‘impertinence’ toward educated Indians, the ‘smiling tours’ of the Prince of Wales to India and then West and South Africa in the early 1920s offer a unique lens through which to explore the largely unwritten history of African and Indian empire loyalism in a comparative frame. Whereas the loyalism of the ‘Black Englishmen’ and their faith in the civilizing mission is generally assumed to have become obsolete after the First World War, the vigorous engagement of western educated African and Indian elites with the symbolism and politics of these royal tours reveals that, however compromised and contested, loyalism retained saliency for many nationalist leaders and intellectuals well into the 1920s and that the idea of imperial monarchy continued to serve as a moral reference point and the embodiment of the freedoms and rights implicit in a liberal empire. Loyalism, expressed as fidelity to the monarch, moreover, is explored in its many guises and aspects, ranging from an expression of deep affective ties to scorching criticisms of administrations that had betrayed the imperial faith and notions of equality of all subjects of the crown. Laying claim to ‘true’ loyalty’, many Indian and African writers compared theirs with what they claimed was the self-serving, narrow loyalty of white settlers and colonial bureaucracies.

The ‘true’ identity and supposed historical significance of Tiyo Soga (1829–71) has changed through time. Lauded by his first biographer (John Chalmers) as ‘A Model Kafir’, someone who lived an exemplary life in terms of the ‘civilizing mission’ through becoming the first Xhosa minister and tireless missionary to his ‘countrymen’, Soga has subsequently been hailed, one might say claimed (or reclaimed?), in succession as: the first ‘New African’; ‘the father of black nationalism’; the progenitor of Ethiopianism and the ANC; and the ‘founding father of black modernity’. This article revisits the question of Soga’s self-avowed, but now in contemporary South Africa downplayed or disavowed, British loyalism. The argument is that such loyalism was in keeping with Soga’s experience and theoretical understanding of mid nineteenth-century British nationalism and that he saw no contradiction between such Britishness and his own sense of ‘Gaika’, Xhosa or black African identity. To paraphrase the words of John Iliffe in Honour in Africa, such loyalism stemmed from, and allowed, Soga’s adoption of ‘respectability’ in order ‘to liberate’ himself ‘from ideas of honour no longer in tune with [his perception of] reality’.

By 1970, Britain was considered a world leader for its practice of cremation, which had by then surpassed the custom of burial. Yet even before, Britain's leadership in an international cremation movement seemed natural. Britain's prominence possessed a basis in politics and in memorialization practices long before it held a statistical basis. This study explores the acceptance of cremation and how the First World War and an Anglo-centric narrative played vital roles in this outcome. When Victorian cremationists first proposed "modern cremation," the term involved improving a ritual found in Britain's Empire. Progress represented an important task to those who confidently presumed the validity of the imperial "civilizing mission." While that attitude gave cremationists determination, it did not speak to a world ravaged by war. Therefore, what "modern cremation" entailed had to change, particularly after 1945, when an international movement needed to rehabilitate its reputation. The International Cremation Federation, having begun to rely on Britain's Cremation Society before the war, leaned on it heavily afterward, along with a revitalized "modern cremation" largely developed in Britain after 1918. Death was not necessarily denied but its symbolism demonstrably shifted away from the grim emblems associated with burial and reminiscent of a destructive war.

Benjamin West’s 1771-1772 painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians depicts a scene of apparently amicable barter of commodities for land between European settlers and Native Americans. In the painting (Figure 1), Lenni Lenape Indians look intently at the bolt of white cloth displayed by kneeling Quakers, while William Penn and a Native counterpart stand with arms spread, both looking to the Native chief for his judgment of the whites’ proposition. But whether he agrees is apparently moot: the deal has already taken place.

The Department of History (presently Historical Studies for those too squeamish to say History) in the University of Cape Town reaches its centenary in 2003. Ordinarily, such modest longevity is not something to send historians scrambling to cross-check their trusty Guinness Book of Records. But one hundred years of continuous teaching, research and writing makes Cape Town not only the oldest Department of History in sub-Saharan Africa. It is, in all probability, the longest-surviving centre of history as an academic discipline on the entire African continent. Needless to say, anyone with Black Athenian instincts may quibble over so westernized and colonial a founding vintage. It surely is a bit much to have a to fix the beginnings of modern professional history in the early Edwardian British Cape Colony. Still, given the known facts and circumstantial evidence, it is the dead white males of South Africa who first got university history going. And if this observation does nothing else, it may encourage one to revisit the dreaming Rhodes. The Cape part of that great civilizing mission was perhaps always a better bet than the Cairo leg. What kind of lease has professional history on the southern tip enjoyed? Its standing was secured in the 1900s, with the founding of a highereducation history department in what was then the South African College at Cape Town. And the resoundingly pro-British and imperial agenda then in mind was well set by the founding of the Prince of Wales Chair of History in the closing year of the South African War of 1899-1902. That initiative was prompted by concern that 'the study of history be put on a sound footing" in a trying period when some English milksops were thought to be too soft on Boer struggles against adversity. Sure enough, for successive decades, English-speaking scholars generally took the right cue: the Western Cape supplied the garden servants, while the British imperial manner supplied a partisan historical imagination. Naturally, at another level, history at Cape Town is the story of the reigning intellectuals who passed through what for most of its life remained a slim Arts Department. From the earlier decades of the last century out they come, literary styles gleaned from Macaulay or Namier, political and social sensibilities seemingly from Wells or the Webbs. The ranks included

INDEPENDENCE FROM COLONIAL RULE came to Kenya in 1963 under a Westminster style government with Kenyatta as Prime Minister. By 1970 the Senate had been abolished, the Prime Minister had become the President, the opposition Kenya People's Union had been banned and a one party state controlled by the Kenyan African National Union had been established. In this, Kenya followed a pattern familiar in most parts of the decolonized world. The euphoria of liberals who wanted to believe in the survival of democratic regimes in Africa now gave way to a 1 new pesslmlsm. The work of the Modernization school in the 1960s had faithfully reflected the optimism of the early period. This discourse was Europecentric in its assumption that economic and social development in African states would allow African states to 'catch up' with more 'advanced' states; it assumed that changes during the colonial period had already assisted this process to some extent; it implied a continuation of Europe's earlier civilizing mission, now interpreted in terms of capital input and aid of various kinds; it provided the raison d'etre for the presence of thousands of foreign nationals, living well at the expense of African Governments and of a variety of international bodies, representing themselves as working in the interests of 'progress'.2 In the early 1 970s this discourse came under attack from the writers of the so-called Dependency school who characterized the new undemocratic regimes of Africa as, at best, inferior partners, at worst, puppets of international capital, serving the interests of a new African comprador class.3 The three most influential writers of this school, who set the parameters of the debate about post-colonial Kenya until the early 1980s, were E. A. Brett

IN October 1955, the Nationalist and pro-apartheid body in South Africa called the South African Bureau of Racial Affairs (SABRA) reprinted in its publication, Journal of Racial Affairs, a paper written by a former Department of Native Affairs official, Ernest Stubbs. The paper, entitled Tightening Coils: an essay on Segregation was an argument for a radical system of racial partitioning in South Africa and was in line with the apartheid policy which SABRA, in the 1950s, was trying to impress on the Minister of Native Affairs, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, and his Secretary, Dr Willie Eiselen. Stubbs, despite being a member of the fervently anti-Nationalist Dominion Party, was looked upon by SABRA as someone likely to support their views, because he was a consistent critic of a segregation policy which did not provide larger allocations of land to African peasants and tribal chiefdoms than had been the case ever since the 1913 Natives Land Act. At the same time, like his fellow Dominion Party supporter, Colonel Stallard, author of the 1921 Transvaal Local Government Commission Report,' Stubbs championed the idea of African residence, as far as possible, in the rural reserves. Thus the printing of Tightening Coils was not without interest and represented, in a period when liberal critics of apartheid consistently attacked it for its specifically 'Afrikaner' complexion, a direct continuity of the debate on native policy in South Africa since the time of the Union. This paper, therefore, seeks to pinpoint key aspects in the career of a Native Affairs official, whose views reflected certain crucial features contained in South African industrialization in the twentieth century and the development of white capitalist settler agriculture. Stubbs' 1925 essay came during the middle of a diverse public career. Beginning in a junior capacity as Secretary in several Magistrates Courts in the Eastern Cape between 1895 and 1897, he entered on the last phase of Cape native administration that was beginning to show growing signs of pessimism in the notion of a civilizing mission and assimilating an African elite into the